


Fosterling

by Cluegirl



Series: Changelings [3]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Everyone Is Poly Because Avengers, F/M, M/M, Meta-alpha Steve, Multi, Omega Phil, Pack Dynamics, Threesome, femalpha Natasha, plural marriage, politican intrigue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-03-11
Packaged: 2018-05-16 07:54:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5820361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha is, as usual, the first to realize that things are probably not as they seem, probably not under control, and probably not going to go the Avengers' way.  She might not know precisely what to do about it, but one thing's certain -- her new-forged pack has given her one hell of a motivation to stand and fight for what's hers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KayQy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KayQy/gifts).



> This story picks up immediately on the heels of [Inkling](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2092458), so there are definitely elements of this that will read more smoothly if you've read that one first. And, of course, if you're going that far, you should probably just go ahead and start with [Changeling](http://archiveofourown.org/works/770875) too, since that's the story that started it all. At least you should have a quick look at the meta chapter, at the end of Changeling, to get an idea of how a/b/o/n/w works in this world.
> 
> This story was conceived and written as a no-prize for [KayQY](http://archiveofourown.org/users/KayQy/pseuds/KayQy), who spotted an easter egg I'd slipped into Meet Cute, and asked for some Clint/Phil/Natasha from Changelings verse as her reward for putting up with my evilness. She's waited long enough for it, I daresay.

Clint had brought the Quinjet to cruising altitude, and was preparing to turn the flight over to autopilot when Thor tried to kill him. 

“JESUS!” he yelped as a huge, meaty paw dropped onto his shoulder like a ton of bricks. It took every ounce of his self control to keep hold of the stick and resist the urge to dive out of the grip and come up swinging for brains, but Clint managed it. Barely. With Rogers banged up, drugged down, and fucked out in the back, Banner taking his post-hulk nap, and the whole jet reeking of wet clothes, Orange Haze, and cordite, unscheduled barrel rolls would _not_ end well for anybody. 

The distant ghost of Thor's voice buzzed in his bones as Clint fought his heart rate back down again, but in the headset, Stark was sharp, clear, and snarky as he pulled up to pace the Quinjet's cockpit like a garish bumblebee. "You falling asleep in there, Barton? Do we need to have Jarvis take the wheel so you can have a little lie down?”

“No,” he griped back, giving the Asgardian a low watt glare and a nod toward the empty co-piot’s seat. “Thor’s just trying to give me a heart attack, is all.” 

Thor gave an apologetic grimace and another vague, techtonic rumble as he slipped into the chair. Clint held up his index finger to shush him as he finished setting the autopilot -- the regular old autopilot, not the Jarvis-Take-The-Wheel one, because whatever Stark might say, Clint wasn’t eager to test the FAA’s rules on whether a pilot had to have an actual body in order to be legally in charge of a hypersonic aircraft. 

Then he took the flight cans off and tucked his hearing aids back into place again.

And THEN he gave Thor the middle finger.

To his credit, Thor took the insult with no more protest than an abashed grin. “I did bespeak you coming in, my friend,” he explained. “I had thought your whisperers in place.”

Clint shook his head and gave the flight cans a nudge with his finger. “Nah. The hearing aids get to hurting with the pressure of the headset on top of them, so I just crank up the volume and channel the comms through these.” He sighed and cocked his chair back on its hinges to try and stretch some of the tension out of his neck. "What did you want?" he asked when it didn't work.

"I merely thought you should go to her," Thor answered, voice low in both pitch and volume, but with his face turned at the right angle for lip reading. 

"Who, Tash?" Clint stole a glance back at the hold, where Natasha still held her silent vigil next to Steve's cot, a silent pillar of black leather, ivory skin, and rain-drenched copper hair drying slowly in the the Quinjet’s cabin lights. "She's all right." She wasn't all right, of course. She was too still, her back turned to the open hold, her face tilted down to watch, unblinking, while Steve slept off his damage. She hadn’t even changed out of her combat kit, even though it was wet through from riding out Thor’s battlefield microburst "Besides, someone with a pulse needs to fly the Quinjet."

Thor grinned, and made a show of searching out his jugular with one meaty finger. "It seems we are in luck then." He laughed at Clint's scowl and made a shooing motion with one hand while stealing the flight cans with the other. "Go see to her, my friend. Your machines are simple enough, and I have piloted far more complicated ships in my time."

And to that, Clint figured he couldn't really argue much. 

Tash was all wet leather and explosive silence, and someone who knew how to damp her alpha tinder really needed to be the first to get hold of the fuse. And since the only one Clint would trust with that besides himself had been in a closed-door, no-contact meeting at the Tryskelion in DC for the past week, that kind of did mean he was going to have to step up before they got anywhere near home.

Still, he gave Thor one stern finger of warning as he swiveled his chair and climbed to his feet. "Just don't hit anything -- Earth computers are delicate."

"That was but one time," Thor protested with a laugh, "and in my defense, I had thought it made of sterner stuff. Stark frequently pummels his machines, after all."

"Yeah, but Stark can't bench press a car," Stark himself came back over the comms, all sass and well-laid smugness that kinda made Clint want to put an arrow in his butt just on general principles. "And Stark also doesn't like his odds of catching that crate you're all riding in if something too exciting happens. Jarvis, buddy, you wanna run a quick show and tell in there, so the super spies can have themselves a little cuddle?" 

"Of course, Sir," Jarvis cut in before either Clint or Thor could reply. "If the Prince would direct his attention to the altimeter dial..."

Clint tapped out of the comm feed and turned his back then. Let Stark's legal department cope with the FAA, the TSA, and whoever else wanted to tell the Prince of Asgard that he was only allowed to fly when his magical hammer was involved, Clint had more delicate, more dangerous things to think about.

She didn't turn her head as he drew near -- didn't actually move a muscle, but all the same, Clint could feel her attention fix on him with a snap; a subtle buzz of energy beneath his skin, a quickening of his pulse, a tightening of his gut, as the wary animal within his hindbrain warned him that he had the focused attention of an apex predator. God, was she ever perfect. He wanted to slide to his knees behind her, and brush a kiss across the delicate arch of her neck; he wanted to drape himself over her like the broad back of a tiger, and hang on tight for the ride; he wanted to toss a towel over her head and rumple the water from those blood-dark ringlets until they shone with sparks and fire again.

"They hurt him," she growled as Clint came to a stop a few inches behind her shoulder.

Clint followed the line of her fixed, laser bright gaze, down to the sleeping face of their leader, Captain, and bonding omega. Steve was still out cold, just a little paler than usual due to bloodloss and stress, but hardly a dangerous grey. His breathing, even and slow, lifted the shock blanket like an even tide, and the dim red lights of the Quinjet's hold skated across the planes of Cap's skin, camouflaging the swelling mass of bruise and torn tissue where the bullet had ripped through his left deltoid during the battle. "Yeah," he said, and waited.

Natasha's fingers clenched tighter in the her lap, and the fabric of Cap's encounter suit, or rather, the rags left after someone had cut him out of it, creaked under the strain of her grip. "No," she explained with terrible precision, still not looking away from Steve, "They. _Hurt_. Him." So not talking about the arm then. Still...

He crouched, reaching past her to tuck the blanket up a little higher over his broad, naked chest. "Well, it was a through and through shot, missed most of the big veins," he said, playing dumb. "Large caliber, sure, but even if the bone took a hit, he's healed from worse without a mark-" Her hand shot out, snared Clint’s wrist in an unforgiving grip, and dragged it down to where Steve's hand curled loosely over his stomach. Once there, she forcibly planted Clint's hand on the wide, hot span of it and snarled in his ear, "Not AIM. The Medics. _They_ hurt him."

She let him go then, but Clint didn't move his hand, just thought for a minute about the feeling of Steve's skin, swelling hot and soft over the bone. The blue and red fabric creaked in Natasha's lap again as Clint gently skated his hand up the length of Steve's arm, over a small constellation of needle pricks at the elbow, finally stopping just shy of the great purpling mass of the wound that had sent him from the field to begin with. It looked like the bone, which yeah, had probably broken, was set more or less straight now, and the scabbed over bullet wound would probably give way to scar by morning, and that would be gone within two weeks.

"Restraints," he said, imagining what kind of army base would have the kind of medical restraints it would take to hold back Captain America long enough to bruise that badly.

"His left knee isn't right," she agreed. "It wasn't injured when they took him for treatment, but on his ankle," She swallowed thickly as Cap rumbled in his sleep, a sound that didn't seem to know whether it was a whimper, or a growl, then she leaned in across the cot to stroke the sweaty hair from their pack alpha-when-he-wasn't-an-omega-or-nulled-out-completely's forehead. She crooned a little in her throat -- the kind of noise any alpha would make when they longed to comfort one of their own, and Clint had to force himself not to smile like the besotted sap he was.

For all she might claim to be a null, for all the Red Room had done their best to make sure the Black Widow would stay scentless and sexless as a newborn for all her life, Clint and Phil were agreed between them -- their beautiful wife was one of the precious and rare; a true femalpha, who could probably have sprung a knot of her very own, if she hadn't been neutered before puberty gave her a chance to properly present. She might deny the miracle she was to the end of her life, but Clint could read the lingering effects of the Rut-Haze they'd fought in on her now -- the way it brought animal force to her every movement, the way it sharpened her hold on herself until it was a vicious thing, as if she were terrified of the urges the chemical agent raised inside her. Even in the dim light of the Quinjet's hold, her pupils were pinprick narrow, making her green eyes terrifyingly bright. Clint wondered, all of a sudden, if she'd ever been exposed to it before, or if this was all new for her.

"Hey," he said, turning to face her and slipping one hand into the mess of knuckles and bloody fabric bunched up tight in her lap. "You ok?"

Her pupils widened just a bit, but not a muscle twitched on her. Then Natasha took a slow breath and lied to him. "Fine."

"Fine." Clint answered, and waited.

"Fine," she lied again, and confirmed it with a glance before settling her gaze back onto Steve. Beneath Clint's touch, her cold grip relaxed, and one hand turned upward to lace their fingers together. "Packs are like this, right?"

Clint had to smile then, and shake his head a little. "I wouldn't know, this is my first one too." He didn't think of Barney then, or the Carnies and their weird, antique adoption ritual of bloody meat and hand feeding and the alpha boss licking both boys' faces with his big, smelly tongue. “I’d have thought, growing up with all those other girls...”

She shook her head once, a brisk, brutal movement. “You can’t bond with someone you might have to kill in the practice yard any day,” she said, voice low and soft and haunted. “But I always liked to tell myself that my Dam was probably with the Red Room back then,” she pressed on before Clint could untangle his voice from the appalled silence he’d gotten it snarled in. “Hormonal delusion, I know, but I liked the idea that he hadn’t abandoned me, or been killed -- that my Dam was somehow a brilliant operative for the Motherland, clever and strong, and silent as the snow. One of the very best.” Her lips curled up, wry and tart. “I dreamed that he might creep in at night, sometimes, disguised as one of the trainers when everyone was asleep, and check on me. Make sure I was still strong... Still...”

“Safe.” Clint said the word, not because it was true, but because he knew she wanted it there. God knew where the ghosts of the Red Room had sprung from -- Natasha usually kept any memories to herself unless Phil, a bottle of very good vodka, and an hour or two’s coaxing was involved. Still, he wasn’t dumb enough to wave it off. Not after the fight they’d just been through. Not with the lingering reek of Rut-Haze still souring her deep, dusky scent with wrongness. 

“You were strong enough, you know?” he told her after a long moment. “Whether your Dam knew where to find you or not, you were strong enough. Good enough. You still are.”

She cut him a glance then, savagely green. Then she glared at the mottling skin over Steve’s wrist as if the weight of her disapproval alone could heal the damage. Clint gave her fingers a squeeze and a shake, rumpling her away from the lip of her sulk to meet his gaze, which he tried to make as earnest and no-bullshit as he possibly could. “You are. The whole team relies on it.” He paused, tipped a nod at Steve. “You're even his favorite. You know that, right?"

She cut him another glance and scoffed. "No. Stark's his favorite."

Clint butted her side with his forehead. "He always passes food to you when we eat. Always. Even if you're across the room, and he has to get it past Thor."

"Because I'm a woman."

Yeah, no. Clint wasn't having with that one. He squeezed at her fingers until she looked at him again. "Hill's a woman. So's Potts. So are Foster and Lewis. He doesn't try to feed any of them. No, it's because you're _His_ , Tasha," he drew their linked hands up to the gnarled mass of scar that sat at the back of his neck, and shivered a bit when her fingers curled across the bond mark that she and Phil had worked together to put on him. "Just like you're Ours. Only without the hot, sweaty, naked part."

"I distinctly recall one hot, sweaty, naked event though," she mused then, something low and hungry stirring in her voice. And yeah, she wasn't so immune to that Rut-Haze after all. She slipped her fingers free from his and wound them in the short-clipped hair just above his bond-scar, then used that grip to urge him upward into a plundering kiss. And like hell he was going to complain about that one.

"What are you afraid of?" Clint asked when they parted, breathing it like smoke, like a secret into her damp, still-open lips. He didn't flinch when her grip tightened on his hair, just leaned closer, let the question brush against her lips again in silence. *What are you afraid of, Natasha?*

He felt her lips pull back, a taut, grimacing moment, and then her hand slipped away. When Clint opened his eyes, her hand had returned to her lap, and was stroking idly at the long slashes in that pile of clammy, bloodstained blue.

"Natasha?"

" _This will change things._ " She said it in Russian. He was not sure why, given that the only Avenger who didn't speak at least some of that language is Bruce, and he was still out cold on the other side of the jet. But maybe it made her feel better, talking about treachery in her first language of secrets.

Clint sat properly down on the floor, and signed back at her, _"What do you mean?_ " 

Natasha looked at his hands, not his face, and her expression was grim and distant as she answered. " _Our allies separated our combat alpha from the rest of the team, and attacked him under guise of medical treatment._ "

" _AIM shot Cap,_ " Clint signed back, seeing where she was taking this, but needing her to take every step anyhow. _"I saw the shooter."_

" _In a yellow and black HazMat suit, with a semiopaque face shield, just like all the rest of them,_ " she acknowledged. " _Which would be a very convenient cover for an army sniper, shooting under orders. The chemical attack on the base as soon as our alpha had been cut out and removed from the target zone was even more convenient._ " She took a deep, steady breath, and then let the bloodied fabric slide off her knees. " _How do we know for sure there were any AIM operatives at that base at all?_ "

Clint thought about that, and he thought hard. Advanced Idea Mechanics, as a terrorist organization, tended to suffer from what Clint thought of as the 'too many geniuses' problem. Whenever they turned up fighting, it was because they had new tech to test, and they generally did not like to fall back on the old ones that SHIELD or the Avengers had already bested. But try as he might, Clint could not think of a single weapon or piece of tech they'd faced on the field that day, which he hadn't at least _heard of_ before. He'd been nearly caught up in the Haze cloud himself, because he'd been so sure that the bee-suits still had something more to play against the base when they had fallen back.

_"What else?"_ he signed when he noticed she was watching his face, watching the realization and suspicion break across him. She was ten steps ahead, as usual, and Clint was beginning to realize that the time for guessing games was past.

"A U.S. Army research base was attacked with a chemical agent," She answered, switching to English. "And a General was assaulted during the battle. Security footage will show that a spy with ties to the KGB and other foreign organizations was on the premises, as was an alien combatant," here she waved a hand in Thor's direction, "with no formal non-hostility treaty between his race and any human government, and a metahuman combatant," a nod toward Banner, "who is technically a Person Of Interest in several destructive events from Harlem to Rio de Janero. Meanwhile, our SHIELD Liaison was not only _not_ overseeing the operation, he's probably not even been notified about it yet, which means he can't vouch for a single thing claim we make about what happened today."

"Battle of Manhattan counts for a lot," he reminded her hopefully. 

"If that were all, I'd agree," she answered. She turned back to Steve and leaned down, bracing one forearm across his chest so she could stroke away the thin lines of worry that were beginning to crease his brow. Clint, whose nose was still full of the acrid stink of Haze, wondered if in his sleep, Steve hadn't slipped into his natural, omega state to trigger such protective reactions from the normally stoic Black Widow. "But I think the Winter Soldier might have been there today as well."

Clint choked. Literally choked on the spit in his mouth when those words startled a gasp out of him. _"WHAT_?" he signed at her as he fought to breathe, but she was talking already, hushed and tense, the way she did when she was trying to talk herself out of a downward spiral.

"I don't know for sure. I never saw him, or any of the active kills, but there were..." she swallowed. "There were signs."

Clint knelt up beside her, pressed his belly along the stretch of her back and draped himself over his tiger, letting her feel him shielding her as he said, "Tell me."

"Alphas dead in the hallways below-ground," she said, "but not rut-kills. Too clean, too quick -- broken necks and artery stabs. One group had gas masks still on, and their clothes intact."

Clint bit back the urge to cuss and just nodded instead, his hair scrubbing against her shoulder blade. 

"I found a handful of omegas too, all killed execution style: one head, one bullet." She took another deep breath, and Clint felt it quiver inside her ribs as she breathed it out. "They were all wearing medical scrubs."

"Shit." He didn't resist the urge this time, nor did he resist her sitting back and levering them both upright again. 

"Someone set us up, Clint," she said.

"Yeah, and we left that someone tied up and drooling in the poison ivy when we bugged out," he reminded her. "SHIELD has Ross's number, remember? He won't get a clear shot at us on Fury's watch."

"Not Ross," she answered with a shake of her head. "If he had the Winter Soldier he wouldn't waste his time on us, super serum or no." She flickered a glance at Banner again, and Clint felt her shudder. "No, this was someone else. Someone with resources General Ross can't imagine. We got clear of it, but this will look bad for us. Very bad."

There was only one answer Clint could offer to that one. He slipped a hand around the back of her neck, intentionally tickling her bonding scar as he pulled her into a hug. "Can't be worse than Budapest," he murmured against her hair as she shivered. 

The bitch-pinch over his kidney was totally worth it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody either goes to bed, or has a shower.

"Doctor Banner." The lump of blankets didn't move. 

Natasha sighed, reminded herself that kicking an alpha who was a) covered head to toe in trace amounts of Rut-Haze powder, and b) had a good chance of turning into the Hulk when pissed off, was not a good answer to her own frustrations. She shifted, finding firm skin inside the welter of soggy wool with the toe of her boot, and giving it a nudge.

"Bruce, come on. It's shower time."

That won a groan, at least. Natasha folded her arms across her breast, her still-clammy encounter suit squeaking against her back as the motion pulled it tight. 

"Thor, is the medical kit still over there?" she asked, half turning to watch the big man settle Steve's weight across his chest as if he were no more than a drowsy toddler -- knees curled around Thor's hip, one massive hand hooked over Steve's hip from above while the other spread wide between his shoulderblades, pressing them chest to chest. It was the same way he'd carried Steve to bed after they'd dug him out of his awful, improvised heat-den in Stark's sub-basement on the day they had all let their Captain's desperate, lost loneliness bond them together in a knot Natasha wasn't sure would ever come unraveled. Steve had curled into Thor's mass then just as trustingly then, as if his hungry skin had remembered being slight enough to carry, and feeling safe enough to let strong arms do the job... 

She forcibly quelled a stab of jealousy, and quelled it at once. It wasn't as if she had the leverage to hoist an unconscious Captain America, anyway.

"Aye, it is," Thor answered, hooking the kit bag out from under the emergency bunk with the toe of his boot and sliding it across the floor by the same means. Natasha caught it with her own boot, then crouched to yank it open. "I could return for Doctor Banner if you wish," Thor offered, his footsteps nearing behind her. "Or send the healers back with a stretcher for the Captain if you had rather not-"

"No." Natasha swallowed against the growl rising in her chest. "No, you should... stay with Steve. He'll be disoriented when he wakes up, and someone should be there to tell him it's okay." 

"Surely the healers would not leave him alone," Thor asked, innocently puzzled as Natasha finally uncovered the big bottle of saline eye wash from the med-kit and sat back on her heels.

"It should be one of _us_ ," she replied, letting the weight of her stare convey the matter to the alien who had somehow braided himself into the Avengers pack without knowing much of anything about how humans worked. "Steve will need to know he's safe, or he'll never rest. And... you're the strongest of us." Oh, how it stung to admit that, but Natasha knew better than to lie to herself -- no one would challenge Thor for access to Steve, and if they did, the noise of their utter destruction would be warning enough to bring the rest of the pack running.

And besides, the last thing any of them wanted was Banner, their closet alpha, waking up with soured Rut-Haze in his nose, and Thor, who looked like a prime alpha, smelled like a stroppy beta, and hardly knew what any of it meant, manhandling him into a decon shower. Thor and the Hulk fought enough already as it was -- the Tower didn't need another Thunderdome incident. Natasha was null, her scent as neutral and unthreatening as a child, and her training equal to the task of easily managing an alpha in any state barring, perhaps a full-on combat rage. (She could handle that as well, of course, but the idea behind being in a pack was NOT to kill ones pack mates, or so she'd been told.)

For a moment, Thor considered her, his blue eyes sharp and assessing, as if looking for the weak spot off which he meant to launch his argument. Natasha found herself swallowing the urge to show him her teeth as a dissuading measure. But then Steve stirred in Thor's embrace, made a restive little murmur that crawled into Natasha's belly and almost dragged her to her feet with the urge to soothe it away even as Thor curled Steve higher against him, and murmured comfort at his temple.

Banner heard that little cry too though, and he shifted, rumbling ominously in his wadded nest of shock blankets. "You should go now," Natasha told Thor, clipped and harsh. 

Luckily for them all, he took her warning at face value, hefting Steve up higher against him, tucking the Captain's face into the thick fall of his hair, and backing toward the jet's exit ramp. "I shall watch over our Shieldbrother's rest," he promised her as he ducked under the cowling and turned to go, "but today was hard won, and I would have you seek rest and ease of your own before long, my Shieldsister."

She waved him away with a nod that didn't mean a promise of her own. Natasha didn't want rest, and she didn't want ease -- she was sore, cold, hungry and grumpy, haunted by half-remembered ghosts, and half realized fears, and what she _wanted_ was to let the SHIELD medics figure out how to lure Dr. Banner down to decon, while she took about an hour in the gym with one of Steve's heavy bags and tried to wear her out enough to let her sleep.

Of course, the fact that Phil had told the SHIELD techs to set the showers up IN the damn gym would put a damper on that idea, too. She sighed and shook her head, resolutely refusing to mull over the timing of her husband being released from his weeklong DC meeting just in time to meet them all back at the Tower after this disastrous Op. Even now, Phil was down in Tony’s workshop as if he'd never left them, trying to impress on Stark that ex-weapons contractor or not, he did not have the clearance to keep samples of a category one controlled substance, whether he was washing it out of his armor or not. 

Phil was home, Clint was home, and she was home. None of them had been hurt, and for all the sight of his injuries had made Natasha want to rend flesh with her bare hands, Steve hadn't even been all that badly injured.

He'd been well enough to fuck Stark cross-eyed before the base had even been cleared, after all, she huffed a laugh to remember. They were okay. Her pack -- her _family_ were okay.

And she had a job to do.

Natasha leaned in over Bruce's huddle, and delicately peeled the blankets away from his face. "Bruce...?" she murmured, voice like sticky honey, dripping with all the warning he was going to get. The doctor's brow creased briefly, and he nuzzled down away from the light with a grumble, and well, that was that then, wasn't it? She sat back on her heels, took careful aim, and squirted a stream of cold saline solution right into his ear.

"NGAH!" 

"Time to get up, Bruce," she informed him as politely as she could manage, oddly uncowed by the burst of alarm and anger she smelled rolling off him as he lurched upright.

"What why would you... That... did you just..." the doctor glared at her, his hand still clapped over his ear as saline dripped dark tracks through the caked dust left on his skin. "What the _Hell,_ Natasha?"

"Have you ever had a rut fugue?" she asked him, pushing up from her crouch and tossing the saline bottle at the bunk across the jet's hold. Bruce was still glaring up at her, trying now to dry his ear with the blankets, but not yet on his feet. "You've heard of that, right? That killer hangover feeling that alphas can sometimes get after -"

"No," he growled, and finally began to unwind himself. "I mean yes, I've heard of the condition, but it's never really been a problem for me. Why did you-"

"Well, that drug that's caked all over your skin, as I understand it, leads to some of the worst rut-fugue symptoms ever," she cut in, merciless. 

"That's..." he looked down, registering his condition at last, and rubbing one hand through the caked-down thatch of hair on his chest. "Is this...?"

"Thanks to Thor we all got a little rain-rinse before heading home," she told him, turning toward the exit ramp "But unless you want to go and rub that crap all over your bed in the name of science, there's a proper decontamination shower waiting downstairs."

She heard him take a deep breath in, heard him hold it, counting off seconds between the tick of her heart and the tock of her boots on the gantry. Then he was shuffling after her, blankets dragging with a reptilian hiss over the jet's grated floor, and if she didn't precisely wait for him, she didn't put much effort into eluding him either.

"Smells weird," he observed as they waited for Jarvis to bring the elevator near. His voice was low in his chest, halfway to an alpha rumble already. "Mmmf. Burnt plastic and tar... gross... Can't wait to get this off me."

"Yeah," she sighed, thinking of cold handcuff nights, and bitter, half-dreamed smells of bay rum, cheap gin, cordite and clover that never quite turned out to be home, no matter how she had wished. "You say that now, but wait till you smell the decon spray..."

~***~

"Where's Natasha?" Phil asked, and had to smile to watch Clint viciously repress the urge to flinch guiltily.

"She's still wrangling Dr. Grumpypants through the decon showers," he answered, not turning from the open filing cabinet, nor even casting a glance at the computer and briefcase Phil had definitely _not_ unpacked from his luggage before rushing to meet his pack on the helipad. "Where's Stark?"

"Most likely, he's breaking into Dr. Banner's quarters, and planning to ambush him with a demand for sex." 

Clint looked up at that, brow quizzical. "Seriously? Rogers just finished going all caveman on his ass not two hours ago."

"Call it a need for reassurance," Phil shrugged, plucking the ballpoint from over Clint's ear before it could fall. "Or call it Stark's insatiable libido, and need to mark his territory. Either would be accurate. Is Rogers-" 

"Thor’s got Cap up in his room now the medics have had their look," Clint replied, swiveling the chair to grin. "Pretty sure he put that hammer of his in front of the door once he sent them packing too, so nobody'll be getting in there till Steve's slept it off and gets hungry."

"Unless they go in through the air ducts," Phil suggested mildly.

Clint's grin was utterly without shame. "Pssht. Now that's just crazy talk," he began, but got no farther before Phil stepped between his knees and kissed him silent. Well... non-verbal, anyhow. 

Clint curled around him, all arms and shins and craning neck to keep the kiss going until Phil snared his scruff and stood upright again. "Clint?" he said.

"Mmm?" it was the sound a smile made, close-eyed and boneless-smug, and Phil had to resist the urge to lean down and taste it again.

"Why are you going through my desk?"

Unsurprisingly, Clint's smile didn't waver. If anything, it relaxed a little more, turning the firm grip Phil had taken of his husband's hair into an open-handed cradle to support the full weight of his head. "Cause that's where all the paperwork lives..." he sighed.

"Paperwork..." Phil blinked. But sure enough, when he glimpsed the folder tags, they were all form blanks for incident and damage reports. Still, he had to ask, "Seriously?"

And that put paid to the smirk at last. "For my sins," Clint replied, sitting up under his own weight again. "It's not like Steve'll be in any shape to debrief anytime soon, and I know how much you hate filing on Ops you didn't personally oversee, so since I finished up the post-flight checks on the jet, I figured I'd just..."

"Break into my desk and go looking for the incident reports."

"Yup."

"And snooping in my suitcase didn't have anything to do with this decision at all, did it?" he added, cutting a pointed glance at the laptop on the corner of the desk.

"You wound me!" Clint protested, suddenly wide-eyed with innocence. 

"Not fatally," Phil answered, turning away with a smirk. "Come on, let's go see our wife."

"See now that's where my genius comes in," Clint protested, his voice rising as Phil did not stop to hear reason. "Because this is where she keeps her clothes, and over there is where she keeps her tea and depressing Russian literature, so it's a pretty sure thing that mountain's gonna be coming right back to... um, us..." Phil paused at the apartment door and fired back an unimpressed look over his sunglasses. "Um... I already ordered a pizza?" Clint offered, one hand scratching the back of his neck, the other clutching a sheaf of incident reports.

"Barton, are you seriously trying to make me believe you'd rather eat pizza than go join Natasha in the shower?"

Clint's face crumpled in a helpless sort of wince as he shrugged. "Um... see, it's just the decon chemicals kinda make me wanna barf," he tried pathetically, as if they didn't both know that Clint's beta nose was the least sensitive of any of the Avengers. On some level, however, he must have realized that the excuses weren't going to stand, because he set the paperwork down, and began to shuffle to heel, is if he was helpless to resist the gravitational mass of Phil's expectant face. 

"They make everyone want to barf," Phil waited until Clint was at his side to answer, curling a hand around the man's neck by way of a reward for his compliance. "That's the universal truth of decon showers; once you've had one, you need a regular shower to recover from the trauma. As you'd know, if you'd ever actually gone to one when you were ordered to."

"What can I say?" Clint shrugged, rolling up close to nuzzle briefly at Phil's tough-scarred bond gland, "I like to make my immune system work for its keep."

Phil sighed, selling it as annoyance, as if they both couldn't smell the building arousal Clint's attention to his neck were prompting. It was a comforting temptation, to let the simple, animal want bubble up through his skin now that his mates and his pack were close around him again. He was close enough now to pick up the sluggish, reassuring mental trickle of _'all right, really and truly and nearly completely all right'_ that their maturing packbond still let through to those who had shared in its conception. How easy to subsume himself into that gentle flow and just wrap it around himself, now the immediate danger had passed, how tempting to pretend he didn't see the subtler, more patient shifts of the ground beneath their feet.

It had been a very long week in DC...

Phil steered Clint into a proper kiss, wet and deep and wide open, taking full advantage of his husband's post-battle horniness until the ding of the arriving elevator interrupted it. It took a few moments to get them into the car though -- beta though he was, Clint was as responsive as any rutting alpha once he got a mouthful of neck and a good hard snog in him. It was secretly one of Phil's favorite things about the man, after the well-hidden competence, the enduring good-heartedness, and the ridiculously cornball humor. 

He put some effort into not using the beta's healthy sex drive against him, but Phil wasn't above letting it be useful in putting off certain kinds of conversations when he could use the delay to his advantage. Especially when Clint did that thing with his ear that turned Phil's knees to grease every time...

"So," Clint murmured, lips brushing the short hair at Phil's temple, "You’re riding with the Cavalry now, huh? Should I be jealous?"

Like that conversation, for example. 

Phil gave up a sigh, then rolled his head to catch Clint's throat in his teeth and give it a quick, hard warning bite. "There's nothing about Agent May in the incident report paperwork, Barton," he growled against his skin. 

"That's not a denial," Clint answered, jaw hard, eyes bright and unrepentant with challenge. A thin, sour thread of hurt threaded through the bread-warm sweetness of his arousal, a stroke of tarnish over the silver glint of his scent as he allowed Phil's grip to stop him drawing away. 

"No, it's not," Phil replied, scrubbing the annoyance out of his voice, even as he caught the tart scent of it curling up from his skin. "But we are not going to have this conversation without Natasha, are we?”

Clint stared for a long moment, clearly weighing his urge to pick the fight that lay between them against the mood they both knew Natasha had to be in, and the likely escalation effect each would have on the other. Eventually, he huffed a sigh and nodded, the cut of his eyes making it clear what he thought of the delay. “No,” he sighed, reaching for Phil’s tie to pull them back together again, “No, we’re not.”

The kiss he demanded then was as good as an ultimatum though, and both of them fully understood that the reckoning wouldn’t be far off at all, nor any punches pulled when it came. Phil met that demand with full agreement, glad to have at least the shadow of it out, and clearance bedamned. If Fury expected Phil to fade out of his bondmates’ lives like an obedient ghost at his beckoning, especially after the brush with death Phil had during the attack on Manhattan, then who was Phil to deny the Director such an important lesson in priorities?

***

It took a little while for them to get to the gym, but once the elevator doors opened, Clint was glad to see that the decon shower setup was fully broken down; techs and hoses and plastic sheeting and sniffer dogs all packed up and taken off to SHIELD where they belonged. The fading rankness of the decon chemicals seeping through the smell of bleach and wood oil as the only reminder that the operation had been there at all.

On any other day, that stink -- like rotten milk and scorched plastic with a huge, unhelpful splash of gardenia perfume over the nastiness -- would have been enough to put Clint right out of the randy mood Phil had been working him into. His eyes weren’t the only sense that had sharpened up in compensation after he’d blown his ears to shit, after all. 

But most other days didn’t include an hour of watching Steve Rogers rut up like a bull and fuck the everloving hell out of Tony Stark in the woods. Not a show put on for his benefit, exactly, but part of keeping watch and securing the perimeter included checking in and making sure that Stark’s yowling and Caps’ roaring snarls were the good kind, right? And so getting an occasional eyeful of Cap eating Stark’s ass like it was his last meal, or folding Stark in half against the ground so he could loom over and drive his half-knotted prick into the omega in like a goddamned jackhammer... well, you could call that a perk of being a good pack-beta too.

Clint was an _excellent_ pack beta.

Clint was also horny enough to pound nails just then. Had been for hours, and if his uniform hadn’t had an armored cup, and if Rogers and Stark and the lingering rut-haze hadn’t funked up the quinjet for the ride back, everyone on the team would have known it as well. 

Phil knew it though, and with the eventual reckoning mutually logged into their mental calendars under ‘later’, Clint was absolutely not shy about rising to his omega’s goading, not timid about reaching for what he wanted at all. He could smell Phil’s want simmering from his skin, all slick and buttery under the cinammon candy and sun-warmed grass, he could feel Phil’s want rocking against his hip, could taste it in the sweet spot behind his ear that always made the omega whine, high and nearly silent in this throat when Clint sucked it purple and tender.

His uniform’s armored cup had become a torture device by the time they made it out of the elevator, and once they’d both managed to work his clothes open enough to get the damned thing out, well, it was hardly any more of an effort to just take them the rest of the way off. And Phil’s suit too, because why should Clint be the only one naked, after all? And if they left a trail of clothing to mark their tussling, kissing, biting progress across the gym floor, well neither of them was exactly prepared to give a damn about the clutter.

“Fuck, let me taste you,” Clint groaned, spinning Phil as they pushed through the shower room door and dropping to his knees when he got a stable wall behind Phil’s back. He snared one knee up over his shoulder and leaned close, nosing behind the curving arch of Phil’s hard prick to run his tongue through the slick that was just beginning to seep past the rim of his loosening hole, and Jesus fuck, but no wonder Cap had lost his mind over it. The taste of pure lust exploded across Clint’s tongue, familiar by smell, but so deep and intensely potent to actually taste that it made his cock lurch and spurt precome across the tiles.

“Barton!” Phil gasped, one hand winding a death grip on Clint’s hair as his shock gave way to eager compliance. “What are... You just ... Oh, that’s not sanitary...” There was a thump, hollow as the a head dropped bonelessly back against a wall, and suddenly Phil was grinding down on his tongue with a whining groan and a surge of slick from his loosening hole.

“Mmmmbeen thinking of this all day,” Clint confessed, getting both hands under Phil’s ass so he could lift, tilt, and hold him open at the same time. The pink of his entrance was flushed and bright, gleaming with spit and slick, and twitching as if Clint’s focused attention made it shy, or possibly eager. Phil’s fingers twisted pointedly in Clint’s hair, and okay, eager it was, then. 

He grinned, and dove back in to taste again, wondering in a distant, baffled part of his mind, why he had never even thought about doing this with his delicious omega before. He’d loved the taste of Tasha on his face, loved how he could work her to clutching spasms under his tongue, and sure, Clint didn’t have an alpha’s biological need for the omega’s body chemistry, but as the rich, redolent taste of Phil’s slick filled his mouth and his brain with pulsing red hunger, Clint couldn’t think of any goddamned reason why this hadn’t been happening between the three of them all along.

Another hand, hotly wet and sharp-nailed, clutched in his hair just as Phil jerked in Clint’s hold, a shocked sound muffled thoroughly before it could escape him. Clint resisted the pull for one more stubborn lick, but when Natasha growled deep in her chest, and her grip edged over command and into actual hurt, he let her tip his face back to the light. 

“Hey babe,” he panted around a grin as Natasha glowered down at him, dripping still-hot water in sheets from her hair and milky skin. “You want a taste?”

“You two are _so_ not subtle,” she said, but the thunderous look on her face cracked at the corner of her mouth, and she swooped low to kiss him, marauding and sloppy, licking Phil from his lips and tongue. “Can’t a girl shower in peace?” she murmured, delivering a final nip to Clint’s lower lip.

“Oh, don’t mind us,” Phil replied, mild and sarcastic above them. “Clint’s just about to make me lock on air, is all...”

Natasha huffed a silent laugh. “Rude,” she said, lifting one of Phil’s legs to the floor. “Least you could do is give him your prick to hang onto, Beta.”

“Mmm,” Clint made a show of licking his lips then, all eyeballing challenge. “But what if it’s your prick he wants, Alpha?” Because okay, maybe he’d forgot to grab her favorite strap on out of her night table drawer on his way down, but Clint was pretty sure not a damned soul in the tower would notice it if he ran naked up to their quarters to retrieve it right now. Except for Jarvis, who had to have seen worse in his Tony Stark Playboy days.

But Natasha shuddered and flinched away when Clint slipped one hand across her thigh, fingers just grazing her wet red curls. “No!” she declared, water scattering from her hair as she shook her head and stepped back. “It’s just... she took a breath, blew it out hard, and then lifted her leg to the side, revealing her sex, puffy, red, and inflamed to the light. The smell of her was aroused, the rose and musk spiking up through her normal wood and old-paper scent but it was laced with a dark, sore note as well.

Phil slipped his other foot to the floor, and Clint let him, utterly distracted. “Natasha?” he said, as if the thought of sex was suddenly miles from his mind. “If it’s a reaction to the decon chemicals, we should call the techs back and-”

“It’s not,” she cut him off, dropping her legs closed like it didn’t hurt a bit and ignoring the shiver she couldn’t suppress afterward. “It... happens sometimes. The Rut Haze.”

Clint cut a glance at Phil, who met it with a knowing eye. Surgery had taken her demi-knot, but it couldn’t take her chemistry fully away. And the fact that she’d been exposed to the illegal drug often enough to know its exact effects on her was disturbing, sure, but this was Natasha Romanoff, so it was hardly surprising.

Phil went to her, his bare feet soft on the floor, his pretty curved prick ignored as it bobbed with each step. “That’s fine,” he said to her, slipping his palm along her cheek and turning his wrist upward to her lips. “But we’d like you to stay with us. Please?” 

She stood still, watching his presentation with green, unblinking eyes, and for a moment the same stone-still violence Clint had sensed within her on the Quinjet crested, cracked, and bled away on an atomic level. Then she was surging into the omega’s arms, pinning his prick against her belly as she shoved her face into his throat, mouth open in a snarling, huffing gasp, dragging his scent deep into her lungs to soothe the want her body wouldn’t let her fulfill. 

Clint leaned his back against the wall, warm in the spot Phil had just left, and watched them. Watched him twine his arms gently around her waist, holding her up even as he moved easily within her white-knuckle grip to let her rub his scenting glands along whatever of her skin she wanted. Watched her hands shaking as they gripped him, delved and rubbed and clutched at him like she wanted to devour him, but of course she couldn’t. Not now. At least... not the way she usually did, anyway.

“Hey Tasha,” Clint murmured, his eyes fixed modestly on her chin as her head whipped up, challenge-quick at his voice. “Taste him.”

Her answering growl was as much query as frustration, and Clint gave a grin as he sidled up behind Phil with his hands out wide enough to keep an eye on until he was close enough to reach down and dip his fingers through the wet warmth between Phil’s cheeks. “His slick. Taste it.” he put a purr into his voice, loving the sense of danger inherent in her hot, green, predator’s glare as he raised his hand to her face, just outside biting range. “Worked for Cap, earlier.”

When she craned her neck, lips open, teeth parted, and eyed blown wide and dark, Clint had to make himself keep his hand still, outstretched, and steady. He locked her gaze with just the right amount of blank-faced challenge as she set her teeth to his fingertip, bit down hard enough to hold him in place, and sucked a deep, rattling breath up high over her soft palate. Her eyes rolled closed as the scent reached into some deep place inside her and grabbed the animal there, just as it had done with Clint before, or hell, probably stronger. She moaned, and Clint saw Phil lean close, nose her wet hair aside and murmur something into her ear that made her shiver and hum.

“No,” she said though, her lips pulling softly around Clint’s finger as she released him and leaned back into Phil’s arms with a provocative smile. “Not yet. I want to taste you both on him.” Then she slid her hand over Phil’s hip and delved deeply behind him, forcing his legs wide to accommodate her, making him settle into her slighter mass and hang, pinned around her grip.

Clint’s prick lurched at the sound Phil made, at the thickening swell of his arousal spiraling out into the humid air, and when Natasha snarled and bit at the omega’s shoulder, it gave up another eager surge of precome. “Clint,” her voice snagged at him as he watched the silvery drop well up and slip from his cockhead, spin slowly along its own thread toward the floor. “Clint, get here. Now.” He looked, saw how her fingers had curled down under his thigh, urging it up, making space for him, and...

“Yeah,” he gulped. “Fuck, yeah.” Then he slotted himself against the plane of Phil’s back cupped his hands around his ribs to urge his weight back onto his chest, and ran his teeth gently over the bond scar just under Phil’s hairline. And he meant to say something to their omega; to teasingly ask permission as if the frank sting of Phil's arousal wasn’t already edging into annoyance at the delay, but... Natasha. Natasha was having no playful banter, and with a heft, a grope, and a perfectly aimed hip-check, Clint found himself sliding into Phil’s tight-grasping heat.

“Now _Sladkij_ ,” she purred once they’d steadied, spat out their curses and whimpers, and braced up against the pleasure soaring through their veins; once Clint had bitten his lip hard enough to quell the urge to come; and Phil had thrust his foot hard against the wall to keep it aloft; once the bond between them all was singing of sex and trust and devotion that defied the telling; “Now you fuck him for me, yes?”

And maybe it was both of them who said it, the same word steaming out of two mouths on the same coil of breath, or maybe it was just the bond that spoke, low, and absolute to answer, “Yes...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! It's been awhile, hasn't it? Well, as it happens, this story is not at all abandoned, it's just this chapter fought me tooth and nail over being put onto the page, so it's literally taken me this long to wrestle it down. And just in time for the world to lose its mind over the Civil War trailer... ah well. ANYway.
> 
> Please note -- I am not a Russian speaker, and while I've tried to do fairly by the language, if I've had a research fail here, please do not hesitate to let me know it in the comments. I'll be happy to fix it at once.
> 
> And remember -- comments are love, and they keep authors (and stories) alive!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A meeting with the accounting department.

Persistent SHIELD legend declared that Director Fury never slept. That he didn't have a home off-base, or a bed anywhere on any of SHEILD's international installations, and that if he was not to be found in his office, on the command bridge, or in a conference room, then he would be prowling his domain like a big, mean guard dog, just waiting for someone to slip up and earn a telling-off. It wasn't true, of course, but every time a new class of probationary agents turned up in the Tryskelion for training, the old rumor was bound to surface, often with a betting pool for the first rookie to provide photographic proof of the Director clocking out or dozing off.

The results of the betting years were pretty reliably hilarious, and generally great for morale among the experienced agents. Which was probably why the Director never made much of an effort to put a stop to the cycle, or the mythos, Natasha figured. Alpha leaders who didn't have an omega to anchor their authority to needed every trick they could get, and there were few in the world more tricky than Fury, Nicholas, J. On a normal day, that was a point of open respect with Natasha.

Today was _not_ a normal day, and Natasha was _not_ feeling overly respectful when she broke into the Director's office to wait for him when she knew he'd gone home to his wife for the night. She didn't mind the wait. It gave her time to do some thinking, some digging, and to get a few facts straight before she heard his keypad rattle on the other side of the wall, and the tumblers withdraw in the door's lock before he walked in.

She could tell from the flex of muscle along the back of Nick's unscarred neck that he knew she was in his office the instant he stepped into it, and she could read his instant battle-readiness in the deliberately unhurried way he scanned the room's reflection in the windows while taking off his coat. He'd spotted her in the shadowed chair behind the door before the collar cleared his shoulders, but then again, she wasn't exactly hiding from him. Lurking in wait wasn't the same as actively hiding -- not the same at _all_.

So Natasha boosted her chin in answer to his reflected stare, and waited for him to strip off his coat and hang it before she held up the roster file and announced, "So Coulson's new team; I have some concerns."

"That would be the team documented in the sealed orders that were well above your clearance level, I assume?" he responded, one eyebrow up in challenge.

Natasha offered no smile in return. "The orders, the roster, and the mission plan were unencrypted," she answered, uncoiling from her seat. "And you sent them home with him on his personal laptop. I think we both know that's fair game, all things considered."

He huffed through his nose and turned away. "I assume Barton knows as well then?" he asked, striding to his desk and waking its systems with a press of his thumb and a glare into the monitor's retina reader. 

"Clint's the one who found them," she replied, waiting for him to sit before she crossed the room and chose a seat for herself. "Which says a lot for how 'secret' all this was really meant to be, I think. Now these techs..."

"Agents Fitz and Simmons are two of our best in field tech and metabiology-"

"Under lab conditions, yes. They have absolutely no field experience, let alone for hostile encounters!"

"They passed the training quals," he shot back, holding her goading glare without rising to it. "Not all Field Agents begin training for it when they're pre-teens. Most of them, in fact, begin their Field Probatoin well into adulthood-"

"But not under the direct command of a Level Eight Handler," she shot back. "And not for a long-term agenda that will put them directly in the path of every new Enhanced that crops up in the world! Books and Cleverness here," she snapped the roster file against the sofa for emphasis, " -haven't done so much as a prisoner escort or a traffic stop. How are they supposed to go up against the next bank robber who figures out how to make a Chitauri gun fire?"

Nick steepled his fingers -- one of his tells for frustration, if Natasha hadn't been able to pick the bitter, gunpowder sting of the emotion out of his normal scent of sea ice, green corn, and sage. "The point of the team structure is that they won't have to go up against anyone until the more experienced agents have taught them how," he began, and again, Natasha cut him off.

"Agent May, you mean? She hasn't cleared a Field Duty psych eval since '09!" She could feel the urge to growl at him still threading around the muscles of her throat -- an unpleasant holdover from yesterday's exposure, but useful in the way it brought her closer to his level of alpha, close enough to challenge and get an honest response. Sometimes it took a lot to get that out of Fury, Nicholas J.

He sat back into his chair, watched her from behind his steepled fingers for a long, waiting moment. Then, "You've gone into the field with worse evaluation scores, Agent Romanoff," he said, not bothering to scrub the growl out of his voice. It was gone though, when he continued with a shrug. "Anyway, relax. She's only there to drive the Bus."

Natasha let the weight of her glare convey her silent derision for that little fiction.

"So is it fair to assume you have an objection to Agent Ward as well?" he asked after another moment. " You maybe dug up some deep dark flaw in his record that you think we've overlooked?"

Natasha smiled at that, and gave half a shrug. "Honestly, given that there is absolutely no reason for you to have assigned him to this team at all, I haven't bothered to look into him."

Fury's eyebrow went up at that. "Team needs a combat strike agent," he began.

She shook her head. "You already have Coulson and Mae. And Clint too, since he's going along on this circus."

That brought his fingers apart at last, surprised and glaring angry. "Two psych cases don't back up one field agent just off medical leave," he said.

"Never stopped you when it was Strike Team Delta," she fired back goading him with her stare, daring him to try and scratch this under cover again.

Nick read the dare on her, his dark eye flickering, considering. "Well maybe if it had," he huffed at last, "we wouldn't be having this stupid discussion at five in the morning, agent Romanoff." Then he sat back upright, opened the drawer of his desk, and pulled out a keyboard and mouse, as if he meant to dismiss her from his notice without even a word to send her away. As if she was invisible again.

And didn't _that_ say a lot about things? Natasha uncrossed her legs, let the slow, hissing slide of fabric make her fanfare as she leaned forward to stare. "Then tell me why you want Ward," she dared him. "Tell me why you're pulling this hotshot alpha punk off Garret's strike team and sticking him on a bus full of omegas and women without even a single beta onboard to rein him in."

Fury gave her a look then, a smug, smirking look, as if she'd just put herself in check and he saw a clear win six moves away. "So it's that kind of discussion," he mused in a voice to match the look.

She smiled. "You're trying to dodge the question. Why _him_ , Nick? Why put a kid who's been playing beta to Garret for years into a flying honeypot?"

He let the look drop, replaced it with an uncaring shrug. "His name was put forward in a list of candidates."

"And why bait it with Coulson, of all omegas in the world?" she went on as if he hadn't said a thing, "What are you planning?"

"Every field and strike team needs an alpha for certain kinds of negotiations," he replied, rising to her opening like the steps of an old, well-rehearsed dance. "You know that."

She nodded a checkmate smile. "I do know it. Which is why you're sending me instead."

"No." His stare didn't flicker.

"Why?" Neither did hers.

He considered her for a moment, tilted his head to the left. "You asking that as an agent, or as a jealous bondmate?"

She didn't bother with annoyance at the jab. "' _Or_ ', doesn't cover it," she replied. "Try ' _And._ ' I'm an Avenger as well, as long as we're ranking me and tallying up my investment in the answers to these questions."

He gave up a sigh at that, and lifted a hang to pinch at the bridge of his nose. "Romanoff, I can't put you on the Bus," he said, sounding almost honest now. "Barton, maybe I can swing, but you-"

"Why?" she cut off his equivocations with a glare he was all too ready to return in silence. She let that stand for a handful of seconds, but no longer. "I don't care if you can't tell me the truth," she told him, "You and I both know I can learn as much from a lie, but you do owe me an explanation for why you're breaking up your single most successful strike team in favor of this..." she gave the papers in her hand a derisive flutter in the air, "Sideshow." Then she let the staring silence lie there and ripen between them.

"Because," he finally told her, watching her face carefully, "I need you in DC, with the Captain."

Natasha blinked, allowing herself to react to the surprise while hiding the thick, choking clench of possessive rage rising into her throat like a roar. 

"Yeah," Nick replied after a moment, "It's like that."

"Why?" She got the word out level, and wasted no time analyzing his poker-face. "I won't be the last Avenger who asks why you're splitting us up, so you might as well take this opportunity to get your story straight."

And that shouldn't have made him smile, really. "You must know the Council isn't made up of your biggest fans, Natasha," he said, something like pity in his voice, something like chagrin in his face. "There are those who have concerns about the Avengers, given some of the histories involved. Stark alone is -"

"Ten times more volatile alone than he is with a structured pack around him," she declared. "You knew that even before my analysis -- You've seen it in person!" And when that outburst earned her only an expectant stare, Natasha sat back into the sofa's cushions with a narrowing glare of her own.

"That's it, isn't it? You aren't breaking up the team at all; you're breaking up our _pack._ " It might as well have been a declaration of war slapped down bleeding on the desk between them. Natasha watched his eye dilate as he inhaled, and realized in a distant, abstract kind of way, that her own scent must have spiked up hard and sharp, given the sudden pounding of her heart, and the way her hands ached to clench and claw.

Surprisingly though -- or maybe not surprisingly at all -- it was Fury who looked aside and let the challenge slide unanswered. "Just enough to prove to the Council that the bond isn't going to interfere with your loyalty to SHIELD," he said, smooth and unruffled and false as a press-release handshake. Then he flicked her a glance and an exasperated snort. "Don't give me that face," he declared, though they both knew her face hadn't twitched. "Those weren't my words." 

"Look at it rationally for a moment," he invited, a note not unlike pleading in his voice as he waved a hand toward the open sky behind him, then brought it to rest elbow first, fingers spread like a screen between them. "We have an alien prince with a staggeringly long combat history occupying residence here on US soil with no embassy, or even a goddamned Visa:" he ticked one finger down. "A weapons engineer with staggering PTSD and way too much disposable income;" another finger curled into his palm. "Two agents whose origins do _not_ exactly inspire confidence no matter their recent combat performance history;" Two fingers curled down at once, leaving only the smallest defiantly erect. "And a scientist who experimented on himself in lieu of animal testing, and who now turns into the single most destructive biological force on this planet when annoyed." And that made the fist whole, which he then brought down gently onto the desk, as if it could be anything less than a crashing blow. "Then finish up that roll call by putting the whole team under the command of a Metahuman test subject who, despite his success rate, broke more orders than he actually obeyed, and I think you might understand some of the Council's concerns here!"

"You can't think that destabilizing us all is going to prove them wrong," Natasha said, letting the disgust show in her voice. "You're letting them make us into the enemy just because we don't fit under their thumb as assets!"

Fury was giving her that schoolmaster look, expectant, patient, and exasperated all at once, and she hadn't actually meant to snarl at him, but at this point, wasn't ready to let the slip bother her. "You done?" he asked, and when she had nothing immediate to say, he nodded, and laced his hands together into one fist on his desk. "Good. Now listen to me. I. Am _not_. Breaking up your pack. I'm _not_ challenging your common law bond, and I'm _not_ putting any of you in Time Out." And there he paused, staring at her until she replied with a slow blink, the only civil acknowledgement she felt capable of offering just then.

"You're all still Avengers," he said reasonably, and she couldn't help but find the comforting patriarch voice as unnatural on him as a vapid giggle. "I just need for you all to demonstrate independence for awhile. You'll still have contact with each other, you'll still have all the rights that any other pack is enti-tled to, but you need to prove to the Council that you can all take orders from SHIELD without filtering them through your bond first."

' _So that_ ', she thought to herself as she stood, ' _was that_ '. "I understand," she said with the kind of neutral, unyielding obedience she'd learnt in her youth. ' _Answer yes. Obey without question. Lure the unwary to your embrace, and let no sentiment stay you when your duty bids you strike. Packs are for animals. Love is for children..._ '

The Director stood as well, unease clear to read in his face, even if it hadn't been drifting through his scent like the smoke of a burning home. "Look, I can get you the candidates list for Coulson's team," he offered. "Let you maybe advise on the Strike operative alpha before we recall Ward from Paris."

"Good," she replied, accepting his olive branch with a nod, and a spray of papers as she slung the roster file at the couch on her way to the door. But of course, she knew better than to leave it all there, sprawled in messy defeat between them, SHIELD fancying the Avengers' throat on display. "In case it helps you out with the Council at all," she said, pausing in the doorway, "Thor was talking about going back to Asgard soon."

He knew better than to take her sudden cheer at face value. "Oh?"

"Apparently there's been some unrest in the Nine Realms since Loki pulled his invasion stunt," she said, buttering the 'gossiping confidante' act on thick, since neither of them was fooled anyhow. "He hasn't said as much plainly, but some of us Avengers think he'd really like for his new pack to go back home with him when his dad calls him back to help sort things out. For emotional support, you know?" She followed that gut-thrust with the sunniest smile she could muster. "So if things get too prickly with the Council, you can always tell them that the Avengers don't have to stay where they're not wanted -- not when there's apparently eight other worlds that might be happy to have us." She tipped him a wink and opened the door. "So if the Council decides we're too much of a problem, we don't necessarily have to be _their _problem at all."__

__She was 100% sure she heard a very quiet "Fuck." from behind her as the door swung closed._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it for this installment, Murderberries! The next jolt is outlined out and ready to begin soon, but I'm likely to let some of the dust from Cap 3: Civil War settle before I dig into it. Still, I'd really love to hear your thoughts, impressions, challenges, and questions on this verse as usual. 
> 
> Reader comments are my crack, my candy, and my crayons, and I miss them like mad when they run low, you know. *Taps vein hopefully with two fingers.*

**Author's Note:**

> As always, comments are writer fuel, so please don't be shy about letting me know what you think of this, either here in the comments, or over on [tumblr](http://theactualcluegirl.tumblr.com/), ok?


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